Independence, Oregon: A Small Town with Advancing Technology

How one small town is embracing tech

written by Sheila G. Miller

EVERY FOURTH OF JULY, as many as 25,000 people flock to the city of Independence, Oregon — population 9,666 — to celebrate the holiday with a multiday festival. “The town grinds to a halt,” said Shaun Irvine, the city’s economic development director. “Staffing is never quite enough. We needed a way to be more efficient.” This year, it would be different. Working with TeamDev, the city plans to create a virtual situation room to make the festival smarter. Irvine described it as, essentially, a map of the community with real-time updates—traffic incidents, police calls, live video streams, employees’ locations. Garbage can sensors can tell employees when it’s time to empty them. Employees will be able to monitor social media. “We’ll be able to know if someone’s in the park and tweets at a friend that the bathroom is a mess,” Irvine said. “That will pop up on our screen and we can turn it into action—send someone to clean the bathroom.” It’s just one way in which this small, rural community is using advancing technology to improve life for its citizens. “We’ve set a North Star goal of being a vibrant, active, rural community,” Irvine said. “We want to be a place where you can live, work and play. It’s a common thing that people say, but everything we’ve done since then has gone toward that goal.” The city installed its own municipal broadband in 2007 after learning it would take years to get high-speed internet from a provider. “We did that with the intent of being on the right side of the digital divide, and creating economic opportunity,” Irvine said. “We looked around and we’d gotten great uptake, everybody was able to download Netflix really fast. But we said, we can do more with this.” That’s where the partnership with TeamDev came in. A European open-source software platform called FIWARE awarded the city $25,000 to deploy the technology through its Global City Teams Challenge. The idea is that, after the festival, the technology can be used for other events and day-to-day city business.

Or take Independence’s project with Intel, “farm-to-fork tracking.” Intel has developed a small, cheap sensor that can be placed in every box tote in a field as a crop is being harvested. “Then we can monitor environmental conditions,” Irvine said. “Light, temperature, humidity, the location all the way from the field to the end user.” The first trial run was done with Rogue Ales’ nearby hops farm. The pilot program followed hops as they were harvested for fresh-hop beer in Independence until they went into the kettle in Newport. Now Intel will work with a local blueberry farm this summer. The sensors can determine how long the blueberries sit in the field, their temperature over time in a refrigerated truck, how long they sit in a storage facility. More notably, the information helps food safety—by adding a sort of chain of custody, the sensor can include the food safety paperwork and a list of every person who touches the harvest. If the person who harvested the crop gets sick with a communicable disease a few days after the harvest, pulling those berries from the shelves becomes very easy. The city recently debuted Pacific Power smart meters, which allow power users to see in real time, in half-hour increments, how much power they’re using. “You can really tell, ‘Gee, I’m using a lot of power in this timeframe. I should think about what we’re doing and see if I can reduce that,’” Irvine said. “It gives a lot more detail and information about our own power usage. And of course it provides a lot of benefits to Pacific Power—people can report outages and breaks in lines in a lot more detail.” Irvine knows there are more opportunities for a small town with good internet access and open-minded citizens. “I think in general, with the revitalization efforts, we’ve fostered a lot of community pride,” Irvine said. “People remember what it was like in the ’90s and they say, ‘We’ve come a long way.’ I think the technology just folds into that. People here recognize that technology is the wave of the future, it’s what is going to happen. And I think they find it comforting to know that we are a community that is keeping up with it. We’re not just putting our heads in the sand.” Kate Schwarzler is part of that buy-in. She opened IndyCommons, a coworking space in Independence, about a year ago. She grew up in Alsea, the kind of town that she assumed she’d have to move away from in order to get a good job. She did just that, living in Portland, Seattle and Denver before moving to Independence, where her parents live. “My idea was I would end up back in Portland or somewhere else like that,” she said. “But the quality of life is so nice here, the traffic and the housing prices. It felt really great to be back in a smaller, more rural community.” Schwarzler started a consulting company, but couldn’t stand working from home. What if there was a coworking space in town? Now there is, because she started one. She found a downtown building that had been sitting empty for a decade, signed up a mix of people, and the rest is history. Indy Commons hosts the city’s chamber of commerce and the downtown association’s manager, as well as the state representative for District 20. There’s also a tax preparer, web designer, political consultant and others. “We’re changing people’s perceptions about a small town main street,” she said. “It doesn’t take long to figure out this is a community where we’re trying to do things.”